January: The New York Metropolitan Opera makes the first radio broadcast of a live musical performance

That may be the most astonishing thing I’ve read in this series. A Met radio broadcast in 1910?? How did that happen?

flivver, n. Not much heard nowadays

And surely only from octogenarians.

qwertyuiop, n. and adj. Christopher Sholes patented a keyboard in 1878 that arranged its keys in this sequence of letters, but it isn’t until 1910 that people began using the sequence as a discreet entity. It is later clipped to qwerty.

I’m not sure if this counts as an antedate, but here’s an interesting usage from 1905:

January: The New York Metropolitan Opera makes the first radio broadcast of a live musical performance

That may be the most astonishing thing I’ve read in this series. A Met radio broadcast in 1910?? How did that happen?

Shouldn’t be that astonishing. This was some four years after reasonable audio-radio was developed.
(Though I doubt there would have been many receivers out there tuning in ... perhaps this was merely an experiment.)

busywork, n. Primarily found in educational circles, busywork is intended to keep the tykes out of trouble.

In The antiquities of England and Wales, by Francis Grose, Vol. 1, 2ed, 1783, on page 116, there is an instance of architectural “busy work”:

I doubt that this instance is much related to the 1951 word, “busywork” because of lack of the educational “keep the tykes out of trouble” sense. I thought an earlier form might be “make-work” but I only saw two instances, both from 1888 in volume 21 of Canadian House of Commons debates that were locked behind a snippet view.

“… “Busy-work” has now become a necessity in all primary teaching. Teachers who have not had opportunity to visit those schools whence busy-work took its form and name, nor to attend the few normal [Schools that make it] an adjunct of [their] methods in [primary] work, will find the chapters devoted to...”

(This is poorly digitized with a number of scanning errors.)

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In The Torch and colonial book circular, Volume 2, edited by Edward Augustus Petherick, 1888-89, on page 39, there is a reference to the title of a book or work called, Script Busywork:

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From The Dial, a semi-monthly journal of literary criticism,..., by Marianne Moore, No. 178, Volume XV, Nov. 16th, 1893, page 296, there are two instances of “busywork”: